"In this regard [the challenge of Australia becoming more internationally competitive], it may be timely to review Australia's competition laws. It is clear, in a global sense, we are lacking economies of scale and that Australian companies find it hard to acquire the necessary critical mass in a small domestic market without running up against trade practices issues. If we are not ultimately to become a branch economy, the opportunity for Australian companies to become national champions at home must be considered by re-balancing the interests of consumers and businesses. To do otherwise is to encourage companies to shift to more friendly domiciles, sell to foreigners, or, if all else fails, to close their doors".

Other folk - most memorably John Quiggin in his book, Zombie Economics: How dead ideas still walk among us - have written about zombie theories that, however misguided, mistaken, illogical or outdated, live on and on and on.

Of all the zombie theories, this "national champions" zombie is the one that I would most enjoy burying at a crossroads at midnight with a garland of garlic around its neck and a silver stake through its heart.

Is there a sliver of truth in it? Maybe. Has the sliver turned septic and infected the rest of the body of the argument with dangerously noxious toxins? Yes it has.

The whole thing, apart from the manifest self-serving of the corporates who subscribe to it, has a core implausibility. We're supposed to believe that the way to create more competitive companies is to give them a less competitive home market where they can rort their own fellow citizens without having to worry about the fundamental drivers of creating an attractive product offering. Give me a break.

What really worries me, though, and also worried the Herald columnist, is that this line of thinking is re-stirring just when the Australian government is embarked on a bottom-up review of Australia's competition law. I don't currently have any good feel for the politics of it - anyone closer to it might care to throw in a comment or two - and I don't know whether the pollies are minded to tighten the law to deal more harshly with the usual suspects (banks, energy companies, supermarkets) or to loosen it to enable this "critical mass" guff. If it's for loosening, then from a competitiveness point of view, Australia is going to score a spectacular own goal.

And I'm also worried that this Australian zombie carries a communicable disease, which our pollies could easily catch.

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Welcome to my economics blog

“The remarkable thing about economics is that once you've been exposed to the big ideas, they begin to show up everywhere … Economics offers insight into wealth, poverty, gender relations, the environment, discrimination, politics...How could that possibly not be interesting?” - Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, 2002

"The soundest argument for markets ... is simply that, very frequently, they are the least bad of the alternatives. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's remark on democracy, markets are the worst form of resource allocation, except for all the others that have been tried" - Prof George Yarrow, Three Lectures on Privatization, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, April 1990

"And if there's one thing we've learned about flawed markets, it's that people flee from them, either physically or by resorting to back channels and black markets. Either way, flawed markets can undermine not just communities but whole nations" - Alvin Roth, Who Gets What - and Why, 2015

"Economic controversy is generally a thankless task. You cannot hope to make any impression on your opponent. Yet he is the only reader on whose interest you can count" - Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Economic Journal, 1898

"There is some evil genius which sits at the elbow of every economist, forcing him into all sorts of contorted and unnecessary complications" - John Maynard Keynes, letter to Roy Harrod, August 1935

"We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork" - the philosopher Didactylos, in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, 1992

"I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business" - the blogger's creed, as foreshadowed by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

"They acted as their situation naturally directed, and they who have clamoured the loudest against them would probably not have acted better themselves" - advice to Twitterati, as foreshadowed by Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book IV, 1776